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"Let books be your dining table, / And you shall be full of delights. / Let them be yourmattress,/And you shall sleep restful nights" (St. Ephraim the Syrian).

Saturday, June 13, 2015

Asceticism as Cure for Consumerism: An Interview with Fr. Gregory Jensen

With the impending release this week of the papal encyclical on ecology, attention is once again focused on the social outworkings of the Christian gospel. As I noted recently, it has often been said that Orthodoxy has not developed its social teaching as much as the Catholic Church has. This is not a point of triumphalism but rather a recognition that--as with so many other things--most of Orthodoxy until 1991 was living under tyrannical rule, either Islamic or communist, and thus in no position to make these developments.

But as with so many things in Eastern Christianity in the last quarter-century, we are now happily seeing a stream of books emerge each year to fill in some of the gaps. One such book has just been published. Written by the Orthodox priest-scholar Gregory Jensen, The Cure for Consumerism (154pp.) is the second volume in a new series devoted to Orthodox Christian social thought published by the Acton Institute. I asked him for an interview and here are his thoughts:

AD: Tell us about your background

Let’s see, my wife and I have been married for 30 years and
I’ve been a priest for 18. These are probably the two most important things I
can tell you about myself not just personally but also as a scholar. Everything
I do flows out of my experiences as a husband and a priest.

Professionally, academically, I did my undergraduate work in
psychology at the University of Dallas. After graduation I stayed on for an MA
in theology (and meet my wife—I had a good year!). My thesis was on ethics in
psychotherapy, which got me interested in exploring issues of fundamental
anthropology in the social sciences.

In 1995 I received my doctorate from Duquesne University’s
Institute of Formative Spirituality where I was able study with the late Fr
Adrian van Kaam. Both a Catholic priest and a psychologist, van Kaam was
instrumental in establishing a critical—but appreciative and collaborative
dialogue—between psychology and Christian spirituality.

Like many other programs in spiritual formation, IFS was an
interdisciplinary program in personality theory, religion and pastoral
practices. So on the graduate level, my academic background is in moral theology
and personality theory. This allowed me to write a dissertation—that still sits
accusingly on my shelf waiting to be reworked for publication—exploring
phenomenologically the psycho-social structures and dynamics of communion in
Orthodox liturgy (you see why it needs to be re-written!). My published work is
in Christian spirituality, psychology, and now economics and property rights.

AD: Tell
us what led to the writing of this book in particular

The short answer is that Acton asked me to do so. The slightly longer answer is that The Cure for Consumerism is based on a
presentation I did at Acton University, the Acton Institute’s “four-day
exploration of the intellectual foundations of a free society” (see here for more details). I’m doing the presentation again
this year (“East
Meets West: Consumerism and Asceticism”). It has been well received not
only by the sprinkling of Orthodox at AU (all of whom are my friends) but also
by Catholics and evangelical Christians. So Acton saw there was some interest
in the project beyond just Orthodox Christians.

There needs to be moral limits on human consumption.
Unfortunately, we often equate moral limits with merely curtailing consumption.
And to be fair, yes sometimes I need to make do with less--but not always. The
moral problem of consumerism is not, however, solved by telling people merely to consume
less but rather by helping each other consume in ways that are morally better.
Learning how to do this is part and parcel of the ascetical life.

I think the book provides Christians and others of good will
with a framework to respond to consumerism in a manner that is both
anthropologically and economically sound. Evidently the folks at Acton agreed
and so they asked me to write the book.

AD: Your
book is vol. 2 in the Orthodox Christian Social Thought Series from the Acton
Institute. Do you know what has prompted them to start this imprint rather
than, say, a more traditional Orthodox publisher?

I’m not sure why Acton took the path they did. You might
want to direct that question to Acton. But as a scholar, I prefer to work in an interdisciplinary
environment. That was my doctoral program after all. Being able to have conversations about consumerism with
other Orthodox Christians is helpful to be sure but insufficient. Doing research for the book meant talking
with Christians in other traditions, pastors, lay business leaders and other
professionals as well as with economists (only some of whom are Christians).

While I’d be happy to do so if asked, I’ve never written for
a traditional Orthodox publisher so I can’t speak to what that experience would
be like. For me at least, I want to get feedback from a broad range of sober scholarly
and pastoral voices. Working with Acton helped me do this and further helped me to write
a book that, while clearly Orthodox in its sources and themes, can speak to a
broader audience. I’m writing as an Orthodox Christian but for men and women of
good willing trying to live out their economic lives in a morally good, and
even holy, manner.

AD: The
back blurb of your book notes that in all the railing against “consumerism” on
the part of churchmen and moralists, one thing is overlooked: a massive drop in
poverty worldwide since 1970. Tell us more about this development.

If you take a slightly longer historical view, the decrease
in poverty is more dramatic still. Over the last 200 years, the percentage of
people living in poverty has fallen while the population has increased dramatically.
The economist Max Roser points out that “In a world without economic growth, an
increase in the population would result in less and less income for
everyone, and a 7-fold increase would have surely resulted in a world in which
everyone is extremely poor. Yet, the exact opposite happened. In a time of
unprecedented population growth we managed to lift more and more people
out of poverty!”

It is economic growth that lifts people out of poverty. There is a place for foreign aid, and there’s a
place for government assistance, but what people need isn’t just compassion but also work. St John Chrysostom says the hand of compassion is extended because work
isn’t available (or in some extreme cases, possible). Human beings are made to
work.

For people to acquire gainful, and dignified, work we have
to create wealth. We need to do this not only to pay a just wage but also to
expand the opportunities men and women have for education and access to health
care--to take only two examples.

Unfortunately, many Christians hold what Jeffrey D. Sachs in
an op-ed
calls an “anti-market sentiment.” Yes, as he says, “Economic growth and poverty
reduction can’t be achieved by free markets alone.” We can, and should, argue
over the exact mix of public and private expenditures. Whatever the mix,
lifting people out of poverty requires “economic growth, and hence a market
economy, is vital.”

AD: You begin your book
with a story from the Desert Fathers to illustrate the connection between
asceticism and economic life, a connection that seems to me often overlooked.
Tell us a bit more about how you see that connection.

Consumerism,
is not so much a denial of our nature but rather the frustration of our natural
desire to experience communion with God, our neighbor, and creation. Asceticism
is about forming, reforming, and transforming my consumption so that creation is
once again an experience of communion with God and neighbor.

Human beings are by nature consumers and if we weren’t then
receiving Holy Communion would be sin. Our Lord says, “take and eat; take and
drink.” We are to “taste and see that the Lord is good” and are invited to the
“wedding feast of the Lamb.” Again, we are by nature consumers but our
consumption must be in harmony with the Divine Will.

But communion is always personal and the ascetical tradition
of the Church takes this into account. Yes. there are limits to human
consumption (e.g., gluttony, greed, avarice, and sexual immorality of all types
are forbidden) but within those limits we have great freedom to form our
lives. Ascetical struggle, like the life of communion it serves, is always
personal. An ascetical approach to our economic life requires more than a
simplistic, and let’s be frank often ideological, call to consume less. To do so inevitably means that I’m imposing
my own ascetical rule on you. So yes, fast, pray, and give alms according to
your conscience and circumstances (hence the story of the rich monk and the
poor monk with which I begin the book).

AD: You
then recount the life of St. Mary of Egypt, by many accounts an “extreme”
example of asceticism. How did you see her life as relevant to a book about
economics and consumerism?

Our economic lives, our lives of social involvement, and our spiritual lives are not meant to be separate but to
work together in harmony. Communion is also a consonance, a harmony of the
different aspects of our life, working together for God’s glory and our own
salvation. St Mary of Egypt embodies all of this.

Listening to St Mary’s life every year, I’m often struck by
how she didn’t enjoy her sinful life; she takes neither physical pleasure or
financial profit. She didn’t prostitute herself for gain but to degrade herself
and others. She was, as we hear in the services of the Church, a slave to her
passions.

At the very end of her life she is able to free herself by
God’s grace from the passions—and I suspect profound sexual traumas of
childhood—that enslaved her. Not only does she receive Holy Communion (for only
the second time in her life) from Zosimas but also, for friendship’s sake, she
has a little taste of the food he brought her. Communion with God, neighbor, and the material world all converge in her and all are the fruit of her
ascetical struggle. St Mary makes clear, in very dramatic form, what is true for
all of us: that we can live lives that are whole and integrated.

AD: Toward
the end of your chapter on Orthodox criticism of the free market, you note that
a “systematic treatment” of economic issues from an Orthodox perspective is
often elusive, and more “homiletical” than systematic. I’ve often talked to my
students about this frustration when it comes to Catholic social teaching, but
I present it to them as a feature, not a bug: that is, the OST/CST is designed
to be somewhat vague and exhortative so that actual individuals in concrete circumstances can
figure out how to implement it in details fitting their contexts. Would you
agree?

I would agree that it is a very good thing that both OST and
CST avoid making prudential decisions and so avoid imposing solutions
without concern for the lives of actual individuals and concrete circumstances.
So yes, the homiletic character of both is a feature not a bug. What I was
getting at was something more basic: especially in English, there really isn’t
much research and writing being done in OST.

AD: “Consumption:
Vicious and Virtuous” is the title of your fifth chapter. Tell us more about
how you see virtuous consumption, especially as I think many middle-class
Christians seem to suffer from at least a little guilt in what they consume,
feeling as though they are somehow depriving others of food or shelter or
whatever by the very act of consumption. Do too many Christians operate on a
zero-sum approach to consumption today?

What we can do--and this is what I mean by “virtuous
consumption”--is work to help create opportunities to expand the circle of
economic activity to help more people enjoy the benefits of a market economy.
For example, if you hire a maid service to clean your house, you are providing
work for someone who (typically) has very few skills and who might otherwise be
on welfare (or worse). These jobs are low on the economic ladder but they can
(and often do) serve as a starting point for people to move up economically.
The point here is that economic self-interest and altruism are not inherently
opposed. Unfortunately, you may think this if you hold to a zero-sum economic
model.

At its most benign, zero-sum economic thinking is neurotic.
Somewhat more worryingly for me as a pastor, I think it reflects a lack of
gratitude (thanksgiving, eucharistia)
to God for the material blessings He has bestowed on us. Feeling guilty only
paralyzes us and keeps us from wisely appraising our own economic decisions. Let
me explain.

A “zero-sum approach to consumption” says that wealth is
only destroyed, never created. The reason is that the total amount of wealth is
fixed; and while it can be redistributed, doing so creates winners and losers. Ironically, this is the thinking that leads to consumerism
since a zero-sum economic model ultimately say that I have to take from
you before you take it from me. Now, in fairness, I may have done exactly that
but that makes a thief. If we assume that the whole economic system is
zero-sum, well then yes, the middle class are thieves and robbers just like the
“1%.” But, even the poorest Americans—who are almost always better off than the
poorest Africans or Asians—are also guilty.

This is simply not true. While
there is much work to do, even in my lifetime humanity as a whole has become
dramatically, unbelievably, better off economically. What we want for
ourselves we should also want for others. If it’s wrong for me to be middle
class then it is wrong for the poor of Africa or Asia or of inner-city America.

AD: Though
you grapple with modern economic issues, your book is shot through with a very
healthy dose of the Fathers, and of considerable quotation of, and meditation
upon, liturgical texts. This was all, it seems, in service of a larger
theological vision of the human person and human community, yes?

While I think the free market and economic development are good
things, they aren’t ends in themselves and they aren’t sufficient for all our
needs, but they are morally good. At the same time there are moral limits for
our economic life just as there are for the rest of life. One of the reasons I
like working with Acton is they (and I) aren’t free market fundamentalists or
anarcho-capitalists (nor, by the way, are they or I libertarians). They (and I)
argue that for the free market to remain free requires not only the rule of law
but also the cultivation of the moral virtues. Economic development likewise
requires not only technical expertise but moral wisdom. Unfortunately, a lot of
the people who defend the free market fail to make this clear.

Understandably scholars and bishops take what are typically
secular and materialistic defenses of the free market and economic development
at face value and assume that these defenses exhaust the moral and practical
justification for the free market. As I see it, a central task of OST is to ask if
there isn’t a deeper, moral foundation to a market economy and economic
development. Logically, we need to answers these questions before we can
criticize specific economic or policy decisions.

AD: You
conclude (p. 145) that “consumerism is consumption misdirected.” Tell us a bit
more what you mean by that.

I mean here that consumption, being a consumer, is in the
service of communion with God, neighbor and the creation. Consumerism, on the
other hand, sees consumption as the goal. This means that in consumerism what
matters is not wealth creation—which as I said earlier is especially important
if we care for the poor—but wealth destruction. It is wholly a negative
phenomenon.

Like the other social sciences, economics develop as a
science within the mixed blessing that is the Enlightenment. To put our
economic life on a sound anthropological footing means seeing through and
beyond the anthropology of the Enlightenment. This in turn means asking what it
means to be a person created in the image of God and called to live and work as
a member of not just “a” human community but multiple, often overlapping, intersecting
and not infrequently diverging human communities. The family and the Church are
our twin foundation here but I belong to other communities well. I think the
liturgy and the classical spiritual writings (East AND West) can help us understand
how these different communities are meant to function and relate to each other.

For example--and I’m not arguing policy here: I’ve heard
people say the Church Fathers teach that we have an absolute obligation to help
the poor. Fair enough. They then go on to say that therefore any cut in social
services or unwillingness to increase the SNAP budget is a violation of
Christian charity. While I appreciate the good intention here, I’m not sure
this is the case. Even if it is, though, appeals to the Fathers to justify
government expenditures fails to take into account some important parts of
patristic teaching.

For the Fathers, not only do the rich have an obligation to
the poor but the poor have their own moral obligation in the economic realm. If
the situation allows for it (and in the ancient world, it often didn’t) the
poor are to work and support themselves and their family and not become a
burden on the Church. They also have an obligation toward the rich. They owe
their prayers, their gratitude, and a kind word to the rich. This is something
that isn’t (and I don’t think can be) part of a state welfare program.

So those who argue from the Fathers in favor of government
spending are picking and choosing just as surely are those who argue that
government has NO obligation to care for the poor. Both for reasons of morality and public policy this all
needs to be sorted out, and I hope my book can play a small part in doing so. My
work is a very modest attempt to help Christians and others of good will
navigate the moral challenges of a market economy, especially (though not
exclusively) in their personal lives.

AD: Having
finished the book, what projects are you at work on now?

Some of the research for the book was also done when I was a
Lone Mountain Fellow at the Property and Environmental Research Center (PERC) in Bozeman, MT. PERC is a secular group primarily
concerned with researching free market solutions to environmental issues but I
found them very supportive of my own theological perspective. I hope to go back
there in the near future and work more on property rights in OST. Early
monastic literature and the canons of the Church both I think assume what a
basic right to property as part of what the Moscow Patriarchate calls the human
vocation to labor and right to “the fruits of labour.” The latter includes “the
right to own and use property, the right to control and collect income, the
right to dispose of, lease, modify or liquidate property” (Basis of the Social
Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church VII.1). But, as my wife says, the future belongs to
God.

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About Me

I am the editor of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies; author of Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy; a tenured associate professor and chairman of the Dept. of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Saint Francis in Fort Wayne, Indiana; and a subdeacon of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church (UGCC) resident in the Eparchy of St. Nicholas of Chicago.